needs take the nature of the offenses rather than that of the offenders
as the basis of classification. A change in the right direction has
begun, but the problem is difficult and progress will be very slow.... We
all know of persons convicted, perhaps even habitually, whom the
world could ill spare. Therefore I hesitate to proscribe the criminal.
Proscription... is a weapon with a very nasty recoil. Might not some
with equal cogency proscribe army contractors and their accomplices,
the newspaper patriots? The crimes of the prison population are petty
offenses by comparison, and the significance we attach to them is a
survival of other days. Felonies may be great events, locally, but they
do not induce catastrophies. The proclivities of the war-makers are
infinitely more dangerous than those of the aberrant beings whom from
time to time the law may dub as criminal. Consistent and portentous
selfishness, combined with dulness of imagination is probably just as
transmissible as want of self-control, though destitute of the amiable
qualities not rarely associated with the genetic composition of persons
of unstable mind."

In this connection, we should note another type of "respectable"
criminality noted by Havelock Ellis: "If those persons who raise the cry
of `race-suicide' in face of the decline of the birth-rate really had
the knowledge and the intelligence to realize the manifold evils which
they are invoking, they would deserve to be treated as criminals."

Our debt to the science of Eugenics is great in that it directs our
attention to the biological nature of humanity. Yet there is too great
a tendency among the thinkers of this school, to restrict their ideas
of sex to its expression as a purely procreative function. Compulsory
legislation which would make the inevitably futile attempt to prohibit
one of the most beneficent and necessary of human expressions, or